Mill Creek woman’s photo picked up for John Deere promotion

MILL CREEK — It’s a fun photo: Dawn Little Torres holds one foot behind her back while standing on her other foot in a yoga pose called the dancer.

All on top of a John Deere riding lawn mower.

Her dad, Joe Little, leans against the mower while sitting on his scooter at his house in Rome, Ga.

“As we’re doing it, he just said, ‘You’re going to have this — it’s going to be a great memory of the two of us,’” said Torres, who owns the Laughing Buddha Yoga Studio in Mill Creek.

The photo was taken just a few months before Little’s death in February 2013. Joe Little was dying from emphysema and Torres was visiting him at his home. During much of the trip, there wasn’t a lot he could do with her.

But he had seen Facebook photos of his daughter doing yoga in travels all over the world, including doing a back-bend in front of the Taj Mahal in India.

He suggested they go to the back yard for the photo op. He thought adding the riding lawn mower would bring a little bit of Georgia into the picture.

“He actually had the energy to get out of bed,” Torres said. “He said, ‘Let’s go out and take some pictures.’”

It would probably have just remained a cherished memory until Torres saw a promotional link on Facebook from John Deere seeking people to upload their photos using the company’s products. She immediately thought of the picture with herself and her dad.

She uploaded the photo with her dad’s name and the caption, “Me and John Deere building the good life.”

A few days ago, Torres received an email from John Deere saying the photo and hundreds of others are being used in a giant mosaic that the company is putting up on a massive projection screen during a Las Vegas convention this week. The mosaic can be seen at http://events.deere.com.

Torres loves it. And she thinks her dad would have felt the same way.

“You lose somebody you love and I feel like he’s with me,” Torres said. “I can still hear him laughing and I feel that he would have loved this.”